


What It Cost You To Be Whole

by Lexicon_V



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Love in the Time of Corona, Mutual Pining, Rebelcaptain - Freeform, Welcome Home
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:34:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23743891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexicon_V/pseuds/Lexicon_V
Summary: "She wasn’t here to make friends. If the first and second time she lost everyone she cared about hadn’t taught her anything, the third time drove the point home indelibly. That’s why she became a traveler in the first place. Solid pay day, no attachments."Jyn and Cassian are nurses in a field hospital during a pandemic, but don't call them heroes.
Relationships: Cassian Andor & Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Comments: 50
Kudos: 79





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> DMAT = Disaster Medical Assistance Team.  
> "During disasters and emergencies – and even during large-scale national security events - the need for medical care can quickly overwhelm the system. NDMS Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMATs) may be deployed to get people the medical care they need when seconds count." It's a little like National Guard for clinicians.

Jyn watched the man seated in the next chair pick at his breakfast, his surgical mask pulled down under his chin, the muffin crumbling each time he broke off a piece. He had a just rolled out of bed look that made him look like a friendly slacker, with perfectly messy hair and stubbled cheeks that would have to be clean shaven by tomorrow, when they’d be in N95s all day. He was one of about a dozen people in the room wearing a navy blue canvas jacket with DMAT-NY-6 printed across the back in big white block letters. 

She had skipped over the individually wrapped baked goods on offer at the check-in table. Some business had provided muffins and pastries for all the “healthcare heroes” arriving to staff the field hospital, but six years on the night shift had changed her internal clock and her stomach turned at the thought of eating this early in the morning. Instead, she fiddled with a plain white paper cup of weak, black coffee. She didn’t bother to remove her mask or take a sip. That wasn’t really the point. She just wanted something to do with her hands.

Looking around she felt the smallest pang of guilt. The group seemed to be comprised of DMAT teams from around the country, locals redeployed from less essential floors at area hospitals, and a few traveling nurses, like her. She had taken this job because it paid $8,000 a week. She planned to work her six weeks, then move on to the next hot spot, on and on until the virus subsided or she ended up on a vent. But most of these people were DMAT do-gooders or terrified OR and ortho nurses who had been sent here by their administration to wave their knives at a gun fight.

She shook it off. She wasn’t here to make friends. If the first and second time she lost everyone she cared about hadn’t taught her anything, the third time drove the point home indelibly. That’s why she became a traveler in the first place. Solid pay day, no attachments.

Stuck in her own head, she hadn’t realized she was still looking at the DMAT guy with the muffin. He met her eyes, gave her a grim sort of smile and said something she couldn’t quite hear from her seat six feet away. She panicked for a moment at being caught staring, then gestured vaguely at her ears and shook her head.

He held up his muffin and said slightly louder, “No hero muffin for you?” 

“I’m not a big breakfast person,” she said. “Or a hero.” 

He gave a sarcastic little exhale. “I only got into this profession for the free food and hero worship. Doesn’t everyone?”

“I got into it for the money,” she said. It sounded like a joke, but it wasn’t really.

He raised an eyebrow. “Found the traveler.”

“I prefer ‘healthcare mercenary.’”

His mouth quirked slightly, but before he could respond, a woman in a pristine white lab coat addressed the group from the front of the room. He pulled up his surgical mask and turned his attention to the speaker. 

It was with equal parts resignation and wariness that Jyn noted the pang of disappointment she felt at no longer being able to see his face.

“You’re only here to work,” she reminded herself.


	2. Cassian

Medical personnel were being housed in the many suddenly empty hotels around the city. Cassian had been prepared to commute from his outer-borough apartment, but his DMAT leader had informed the team that, despite this being a local deployment, they would live together onsite, just like any other deployment. He’d spent nearly 14 hours prepping the field site to accept patients starting the next morning and orienting with the other staff who had arrived from across the country. He was relieved he only had to walk a few blocks rather than ride the subway for 45 minutes to get home. 

He saw about six people waiting in the elevator bank and abruptly headed for the stairwell. His room was on the 7th floor, but he found the climb preferable to the inevitable small talk while they waited to ride one-by-one to their rooms. 

Cassian was often complimented on his bedside manner by patients and colleagues, but the truth was that the effort exhausted him. He was quiet and guarded by nature. He cringed at the memory of talking to that woman this morning. His awkward attempt at a conversation had fallen woefully flat, not helped at all by having to practically shout across the six foot space between them. He had no idea why he had spoken at all. He was not typically put out by extended silences. If he was honest with himself, he might admit that he’d forced himself to say something, anything, to keep from just staring dumbly at the startling green eyes staring at him over the mandatory surgical mask.

There had been talk of cohorting team members, but given the nature of the virus and the abundance of space available, the idea had been scrapped and Cassian was relieved to collapse into a space that was entirely his own. His room was small, but luxuriously appointed with a king size bed, an enormous shower, and a small, enclosed balcony- all significant upgrades from his actual apartment. The room had a locked interior door that allowed it to convert into a two bedroom suite and sets of neighboring balconies climbed up the side of the building in pairs, sturdy concrete boxes separated by about four feet of space, with walls that came up to just below his chest. Cassian prayed the adjoining room stayed empty.

So far, the space next door was still dark and unused, so he grabbed a beer from the mini-fridge and took it to his balcony to breathe in the unseasonably cold air with no mask in the way. Looking out at the buildings, lit up and full of people as usual, things seemed deceptively normal. It was only the eerily quiet and empty streets below that gave any hint of the unfolding catastrophe. 

He spent some minutes like that, lost in the calm that wasn’t really calm, until the light flicked on from the balcony next door. He sighed, taking that as his cue to get ready for bed. As he turned to go inside he saw her, beer bottle lifted to her lips, taking a long pull as she walked out. He watched her lower it, take a deep breath, and bury her head in her arms on the ledge. She wearily looked to the side and abruptly straightened when she saw him standing there.

“The muffin hero,” she said. “You a stalker, too?” 

She quirked an eyebrow to soften the accusation slightly. Without a mask on he could see her whole face for the first time and he was once again left searching for whatever fumbling words might save him from just staring like a fool.

“The merc.” He gave a half smile back.

“Jyn, actually.”

“Cassian.”


	3. Jyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little angsty backstory for Jyn.  
> \-----

After her parents died Saw told her, “There are no living heroes.” 

At the time she thought it was his gruff way of consoling her. As a nine-year-old orphan, suddenly left with a virtual stranger in a country where she had only lived for six months, she tried to find the comfort and softness in his blunt, hard words. 

“My parents were heroes,” she’d whisper to herself, crying alone in the night.

Nine years later he’d say it again, when she told him she had joined the army. 

“There are no living heroes, my child. They use that word to wipe their fingerprints off your avoidable death.”

By then she had learned to be blunt and hard, too. Saw had raised her, insofar as he’d kept her alive, but his paranoia had kept them moving every few months, until Jyn had given up on school, gotten her GED at sixteen, and stayed behind the last time he’d tried to uproot her. When she found him two years later, living (dying) in a bunker he had built in New Hampshire, it was just a courtesy call to let him know she might be getting blown up in the desert and, hey, thanks for the unorthodox (fucked up) life lessons.

“I just thought if I was going to get dragged around and put in danger for someone else’s ends, at least I could get paid this time,” she told him. She aimed for a flippant, breezy tone, but the anger seeped in. 

He was on oxygen, gasping with each breath but he refused to go to the hospital. (Medical professionals were on his long list of those not to be trusted.) His judgement was no less harsh for the slowness of his speech or the sadness in his eyes. 

“Are you so mercenary now? That you’d kill or be killed, that you’d become some rich man’s cannon fodder just to collect a few crumbs from his table?”

“It’s a living,” she shrugged. “It’s not like I have a lot of options.”

She didn’t bother to tell him that she was planning to be a medic, that she didn’t have any intention of killing for sport or dying for the government. She was going to do her time, get out, go to college. It was a gig, one of few available to a functionally homeless, undereducated teenager completely alone in the world. And yes, she might die, but then she might die anyway. And it might as well be her rather than some well-loved person with a family or kids left to mourn them.

Nearly two years later, after the IED incident, she woke up in a field hospital- _her_ field hospital- with her burned hair haphazardly chopped off, shrapnel wounds along her left side, and 75 percent hearing loss in her left ear. On cots around her lay the last three people she cared about, on comfort doses of morphine, too mangled to live and not yet dead.

Once she was stable enough, they put her on a flight to the hospital in Germany, and through the haze of the sedative she thought she heard Saw’s words. 

“There are no living heroes.”

\-------

She had worked 12-hour shifts for the last five days in a row and the losses were piling up. Jyn refused to feel bad about being on her fourth beer by 6:30pm on her first day off since she arrived in the city. In fact, she was pretty proud of herself for waiting until after 3:00 pm to get started- an act of restraint aided by the fact that she had slept until 2:00. 

Jyn’s career so far had been mostly Level 1 trauma centers in major urban areas, but she always joked about transferring to nights in the ICU because her ideal patient was sedated, intubated, or sleeping. The past week had felt like karmic retribution for her brand of gallows humor. 

She had dragged a plush armchair from her room out onto the balcony, where the weather was finally showing signs of spring. She was curled up in her favorite sweatshirt with two unopened beers and half a bottle of rye whiskey sitting on the ledge in easy reach and she was looking forward to her mind finally going blank.

She hadn’t seen Cassian since that first night in the hotel, but she didn’t have the time or bandwidth to think about it until now, as she looked at his empty balcony next door. He was probably working the opposite shift or else he was just falling into bed every night as numb and exhausted as she was.

As if reading her mind, she heard his door open and saw him step outside, holding his own bottle and looking like hell. His hair was wet, he must have just taken a shower. She tried not to linger on that thought. Like her, he had bruises under his eyes from exhaustion and red marks where his N95 cut in. He was clean shaven, but it didn’t make him look any younger or less haggard. He was beautiful.

He glanced over and raised his bottle in her direction when their eyes met. She returned the gesture.

“To your health.” She drank what was left in her bottle in one long swallow and grabbed another off the ledge.

He huffed a small laugh and took a long swig himself. 

“Hard day at the office?” she asked flatly.

“They’re all hard,” he said and she didn’t know why she felt wounded by the sincerity in his voice.

He leaned against the wall closest to her and gestured to her sweatshirt. 

“Red Sox? Really? I didn’t peg you for a baseball fan.” 

It was a transparent attempt to change the subject and of course he didn’t know, couldn’t know. A memory of Bodhi flashed in her mind, laughing in that medical tent in the desert, doing inventory.

\--

_“God, I had no idea going to war was so fucking boring,” Jyn whined. “I could do this shit working for Walmart.”_

_Bodhi laughed. “It’s like baseball, Jyn. Hours of crippling boredom punctuated with bursts of excitement. Sometimes.”_

_Whenever she’d complain he’d pat her shoulder and say, “It’s only the fifth inning.”_

_He came back from leave one day and tossed her his old sweatshirt. It was unofficial merchandise, the words slightly off center. “Boston Red Sox 2004 World Series Champions from Cursed to First_!”

_“I got it at the parade as a kid, but it doesn’t fit anymore. Thought you could use the reminder to stay patient.”_

_It hung loose on her and had been worn into a cozy vintage softness she loved._

\--

She looked away and took a sip from her drink. 

“I’m not. I just wear it here because it pisses off New Yorkers.”

He raised an eyebrow. He seemed about to speak, but he was cut off by the sound of shouting, banging, shrieking, and clapping pouring out from windows all around them. Jyn rolled her eyes and stood up abruptly. 

“Want to talk inside?” she said, and motioned in the direction of the adjoining door. “I promise, I’ll stay six feet away on my side of the door.”

“Golden Hour doesn’t warm your heart?” 

“There are no living heroes,” she spat out.


	4. Cassian

They were more than a few drinks deep now. Whatever shadow had passed over her on the balcony, Jyn was careful to keep it hidden from Cassian here in the warmth and light of their adjoining rooms.

She was barefaced and the bruises left by her mask and goggles were stark against the paleness of her skin. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles and faint lines in the corners that spoke of dehydration, sleeplessness, and stress. She wore leggings and that ragged sweatshirt he had asked about. (A misstep, that was clear, but he didn’t know why.) She might have passed for a college student if it wasn’t for her haunted eyes and closed off posture. She looked drained and brittle, but there was a ferocity that wouldn’t be cowed. He may have been captivated by her eyes initially, but it was the quiet intensity of her that kept him from being able to turn away.

They were on the floor, each leaning against the foot of their respective bed, looking at each other through the doorway as if through a mirror. Cassian had his legs sprawled out in front of him, Jyn’s knees were tucked up under her chin. They had passed the better part of an hour trading old work stories and pointedly not trading any current ones.

“So, DMAT,” she said. “Is the ED not demoralizing enough? You wanted to do extra work for less money in worse conditions?” 

“It keeps me from losing my faith in humanity,” he said. “It gives me…hope, I guess.”

“Hope?” she scoffed.

Cassian’s first DMAT deployment was to Port-au-Prince ten years ago. His manager at the time had recruited him to the team. He’d been on his own for a decade and had worked in the emergency department of a large Bronx trauma center for two years at that point, so he had long considered himself beyond the capacity for shock. 

He’d been wrong. 

Presented with the casualties of the earthquake, he cried for the first time in nine years and the tears were a relief. They reassured him that he wasn’t actually dead inside, that he had retained his humanity after all. 

He saw some of the worst aspects of society pass through his ED- violence, abuse, debilitating mental illness, reckless disregard for life and safety, drug seeking, entitlement, poverty- and he couldn’t save anyone. He could only help stabilize them or calm them or keep them safe for a moment until they either went back into the world or died. That was the job. 

And he’d had his own lifetime of loss and fear before he ever set foot in the hospital. Fleeing his own country, losing both parents, violent foster homes, impersonal group homes, years of fearing deportation. (In some of his worst nightmares he’s sent back and his father’s murderers are already waiting for him at the border. He can never go back. Not bearing any part of Jerón Andor’s name and, increasingly, his likeness.)

He’d borne it all with the grim stoicism of a man cursed, but he worried his survival had cost him his soul. Haiti devastated him, but that devastation woke him up. He might be broken, but he wasn’t dead yet. He would continue to bear witness to terrible things, but he chose to do something about them.

He said none of this. 

He prided himself on his ability to steer a conversation in such a way that the other person would find themselves doing the talking without ever realizing that Cassian had given up nothing at all about his past. 

Instead, he said, “Yeah. You can’t do this job without hope.”

She looked at him skeptically and he held her gaze. It felt like a dare. To make her ask for more. As if they were two people who could actually know each other. As if they were sharing something real. As if he had any right to want that from her.

“I bet you’ve gotten a Daisy Award,” she said without looking away. 

The glibness of the words was at odds with the thickness of her voice and the weight of her gaze, but she gave him nothing more. He tried to dismiss the knot of disappointment in his gut. They didn’t know each other. He had no idea what put the ghosts in her eyes or the edge in her voice. She didn’t know what made him scream in his sleep or wake up drenched in sweat. This wasn’t a conversation, it was a standoff. He looked away first and tried not to let the effort of it show in his face.

“No,” he said, forcing the hoarseness out of his voice. “But a patient stabbed me once. So, almost the same thing.”

“Well, that’s actually better,” she said lightly. “Ladies love a scar.”

Their masks had settled back into place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Daisy Award is a nurse recognition award that hospitals can participate in. Patients or their families can nominate a nurse. Actually, colleagues can, too, but LOL.


	5. Jyn

Sometimes when she was feeling overwhelmed, Jyn sat with her passport, staring at it like a yogi with a drishti, and reminded herself she was tied to nothing. She can always leave. (Always.) The irony, that the rootlessness she had rebelled against as a teenager became her only comfort as an adult, was not lost on her. 

Nor the irony that it was totally useless to her now. 

She could finish this contract and go somewhere else, but she couldn’t actually leave. It was literally everywhere. Initially, that had been the point. To follow the hot spots, get paid, and… Well, she hadn’t really thought about what would come next. Her habit was to just keep working, saving her money for a future she had never actually defined. As this contract went on, Jyn became increasingly unable to imagine a future where she continued to work under these conditions, but she had no idea what else she could possibly do. 

It was the first time Jyn Erso had come up against a problem she couldn’t outrun.

Each day, as she got ready to go back in, she found herself gripping the side of the sink with white knuckles, forcing herself to breathe slowly and deeply and not cry. (Never cry.) She had seen all kinds of death- sudden, slow, violent, peaceful, painful, bad deaths, good deaths, welcome deaths, but nothing like this. Not this onslaught, shift after shift, multiple times per shift. Again and again, another patient would die, gasping among strangers. Then be quickly packed up and transported...where? Makeshift morgues, refrigerated trucks. The bed turned over within an hour and filled with another desperately sick person who she couldn’t fix, couldn’t help, wouldn’t save. 

She didn’t know them, hadn’t loved them, and she knew she didn’t have any right to feel these losses. They weren’t hers. 

They stayed with her anyway.

She went to bed hungry and tired, woke up starving and exhausted. Food turned to ash in her mouth. Her sleep was haunted. Being surrounded by death woke up her ghosts. Every night they died over and over again, begging her to help them. Eyes pleading, desperate, terrified. 

Her patients. Her parents. Bodhi. 

Saw.

When she first went to live with him, Saw used to bring Jyn into the woods to learn survival skills. When the terrain was particularly rough, she would focus only on her own feet. If she looked up she would feel too overwhelmed by the distance or the incline or the endlessness of the horizon, so she only looked for where her foot would land next. She could cover miles this way.

Saw hated it. Breaking that habit was one of the first things he taught her.

_“If you can only see one step ahead you have made yourself a target.”_

_“The climb is no less steep just because you refuse to look at it.”_

_“The horizon will meet you whether or not you look up.”_

He trained Jyn to think ten steps ahead, to plan for every possible bad outcome. But now she felt like an overwhelmed nine-year-old in the woods all over again. When she looked up all she could see was the relentless terrain of the “new normal” where nothing was normal at all. Every day was the same and terrible in its sameness.

She looked down and didn’t let herself think further ahead than her next task. Most nights she poured herself a drink (two, three) and prayed it would help her sleep (help her ghosts sleep). 

Most nights, it didn’t work. 

But some nights, she had Cassian. 

Talking to him had become something of a ritual since that first time. Jyn tried not to dwell on how much she looked forward to it. When their days off matched up, they would talk for hours through the open door.

_“Does your family worry about you doing this?” he asked._

_She hesitated a moment and decided to tell the truth. “No family. My parents died when I was a kid,” she told him._

_He looked down at his hands and nodded once. “Mine, too.”_

As the delicate trust between them grew sturdier they each gave a bit more, filling in details by degrees. Jyn was always terrified that the next thing she said would expose her as irredeemably broken, but Cassian, though reserved, spoke more easily.

_“My father was a journalist in Mexico. He was quite well known. He was on a news show that did investigative journalism, exposé stuff. He was working on a story about government corruption when he was murdered.” He paused and let out a humorless laugh. “Must have been a fucking great story. Obviously, they killed that, too.”_

The circles under his eyes seemed to indicate he didn’t sleep any better than she did. Sometimes, when she woke up gasping and crying from her dreams, she could hear him crying out from his own through the wall they shared. 

She imagined what it would feel like to wake up next to him, to hold him when he woke like that. (Or be held.) She imagined knocking on their door and going to him.

She didn’t of course. She’d never even stood within arms reach of him- a fact that only only amplified her longing to step into his space.

If she was honest with herself (and she rarely was) it was getting hard to keep her distance. She tried not to think about the way they held each other’s gaze or how the air between them felt charged with unsaid things and held breaths. How her skin felt too warm and too tight in those heavy, silent moments. How he knew more about her past than anyone still alive, a fact that terrified her slightly. And after years of practiced indifference, she found she wanted to learn everything about him in a way that belied simple physical attraction. 

_“Have you ever been back?” she asked._

_He was quiet a moment before he finally said, “I look just like my father.”_

_It felt like he was answering a different question than the one she asked, but she stayed quiet and he went on, after a long swallow of whiskey._

_“He was on TV and everything. When he was killed they had to hold someone responsible. They sent two guys to jail, said it was drug related violence. That he was caught in the crossfire.”_

_He didn’t look at her when he spoke, his focus shifting between his right knee and a spot in the middle distance over her left shoulder._

_“When I was young enough to have any interest in going ho-,” he caught himself. “Back. I was undocumented, so I couldn’t risk it. Now…”_

_Another sip from his drink._

_“It just feels like a bad idea to go there with my father’s face.” He gave a little shrug and finally met her eyes again. “At this point I’ve lived here longer than I lived there anyway.”_

_She nodded, and tried not to think too hard about what his casual honesty meant. It was clear he was still holding back, but what he gave her was so much more than she would have expected._

_“Me, too,” she said. “I was pretty young when we moved over here.” She gave a sharp, sardonic exhale. “And it’s been downhill ever since.”_

With her stress so high and her guard so low, she wasn’t at all surprised when she lurched awake, as usual, panting and tear stained. 

The surprise was that Cassian shifted beside her. 

She had no recollection of inviting him into her room or falling asleep beside him. Had she gotten so drunk that she became bold? ( _Or reckless_?) Did Cassian really break quarantine to be with her? She knew that was dangerously stupid but her better judgment warred with the overwhelming desire to be near him.

She turned to him and found him already looking at her with concerned eyes. 

“Are you okay?” he asked. He brushed a piece of hair out of her face and wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb. 

She could hardly breathe. She wanted to melt into him but in the back of her mind, questions buzzed. _What is happening? How did we get here? Why can’t you remember?_ There was a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach that she wanted to blame on the nightmare. She stared back at him uncomprehendingly for a moment. 

Then he leaned in to kiss her and every other possible thought and feeling was eclipsed by pure, unmitigated _want_. She moved forward to meet his lips but he suddenly froze. 

“Cassian?” she whispered. 

She pulled away to look at him. His eyes were panicked and his lips and fingertips were turning blue with hypoxia. _That doesn’t make sense._ He took strangled, drowning breaths unable to make any other sound. He looked at her with absolute panic in his eyes and then they went blank. 

“Cassian?” she said louder. “CASSIAN.”

_No no no no no no._

She could feel herself screaming, felt her vocal cords vibrating and her throat becoming raw. Her only thought was _NO_ but she couldn’t hear herself over the blood pounding in her ears. Her vision began to blank, black encroaching from the corners of her eyes until she felt blind. 

When it cleared she was alone in her bed, shaking and panting. The other side was cool and undisturbed. but her throat still felt raw with screaming and the pounding in her ears continued. It took a second to realize the pounding was not in her head.

“JYN! Open the door, please! JYN!”

She stumbled to the door and threw it open. Cassian stood there, looking disheveled and frantic. He reached for her and she collapsed against him without thinking, without even realizing that she shouldn’t. Every sense was flooded with him, the sight of him, alive and warm, the solidness of his body pressed against her own, his arms tight around her.

“You yelled my name,” he said.

“You’re alive,” she choked out, before embarrassment started to creep in. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” She began to move away, her face flushing. “It was just a nightmare. Stupid. It was nothing.”

She pulled away and he immediately gave her space, opening up a few inches between them. But her hand still rested against his chest, his hands still rested on her waist. She couldn’t bear to drag herself any further. She looked up at him. He was taller than she realized. 

His face was also flushed, his breathing slightly faster and shallower than normal. His eyes caught the glow of the city lights outside, pupils wide in the dim light. 

The intensity in his gaze nearly took her breath away. There was always a heaviness to it… had it been like this the whole time? Was the six foot buffer the only thing that had kept her from feeling its full weight? Every nerve in her body screamed to move closer, to feel him against her. But she was frozen in place. She could only search his eyes and feel her heart banging against her rib cage like a moth.

He took a small step toward her, his hands gently splaying across her back, and she leaned into his embrace. She felt his chest rise and fall as he took a slow deep breath and pulled her close. He moved one hand up to cradle the back of her head and stroke her hair. 

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “I get them, too.” 


	6. Cassian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wrote myself into a corner I didn’t know how I wanted to get out of. Then I did, but my brain couldn’t find any good words. Then I was tired for, like, months. Then everything was bonkers again and I was even more tired. And now I think I finally know how to wrap this thing up.

Cassian Andor understood nightmares. If anything, it was a struggle to remember a time when he didn’t wake up terrified of his own insides. Over the years he had tried to blank them out by drinking or by taking someone to bed, but he could never tell when they would appear. It made for some awkward mornings-after, and adult-Cassian learned, just like child-Cassian had, that no one was interested in digging too deeply into the things that made him cry out in his sleep. It didn’t take long for him to find reasons to wake up alone. If he appeared cold or unapproachable? That was better than letting anyone see the mess inside. 

“I’ve heard you,” Jyn said softly. 

Cassian stiffened and he instinctively shifted his gaze to break eye contact. His face flushed with all the shame, embarrassment, and fear he’d long associated with anyone knowing him that way. With being seen. With looking weak. But Jyn placed her hand on his cheek and guided his eyes back to hers. 

“I can’t hear what you say.” She paused and looked uncertain. “Just sometimes...when I wake up from my own…”

Cassian should have felt uncomfortable under her relentless gaze, but he didn’t. Something about her soothed something in him. As if, by seeing himself through her eyes, he could almost forgive himself for being so damaged. 

His mouth felt dry, his throat tight. He wet his lips and finally said, “I never heard you before tonight.” 

She shrugged in his arms and glanced away before meeting his eyes again. “Guess I’m more of a crier,” she said, the sarcasm not entirely covering up the bitterness and embarrassment in her voice.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt connected to another person. Maybe he never had. He was at once overwhelmed with the need to feel every part of her against him and the fear of everything that connection meant. Not just now, not just this virus, but everything that had been stirring inside him over these many weeks of learning about her, of confiding in her. Over these many years alone. 

He didn’t realize he leaned in until she was leaning to meet him. Hesitantly, but no less desperate for their hesitance, their lips met. He hadn’t felt the warmth of another person’s bare skin in over a month. Any person. She pressed up against him, standing on the balls of her feet, moving closer, and he deepened the kiss, casting aside his trepidation. 

When they finally separated, Jyn let out a short exhale. “This is definitely against the guidelines of pretty much every major health organization in the entire world right now.”

“No going back now.” He tried to say it brightly, to lighten the heaviness of the moment. But his voice was hoarse and instead it came out raspy and somber. 

Jyn rested her head against his chest and flexed her hands against his back. He tightened his embrace. They stood, just holding each other and letting the night pass around them.

As he held her close, he longed to bury himself in her, to have nothing between them anymore or ever again. But another part of him, the exhausted, burnt out, bone-weary part, was relieved just to have her near, to feel the weight of her in his arms and smell the scent of her hair as her head was tucked under his chin.

He fought back a surge of panic, a clenching, breathtaking fear that came with the realization that he wanted her. He cared for her. And things have always ended badly for the people he cared about. He inhaled deeply and forced the feeling back.

_ Just for now, let me have this _ , he pleaded with the universe. 

He loosened his arms around her and motioned toward the bed, careful to keep his face open, his body relaxed, not to make her feel like he expected anything. He felt her tense a moment, then shake it off with a breath. She pulled back so their eyes met again. He remembered how her eyes had left him tongue-tied and fumbling from six feet away the first time he saw her. He marveled at how they were even more beautiful up close, green with flecks of hazel and a ring of dark blue around the pupils. She searched his expression for a moment and gave a tiny nod. 

He took her hand and she followed him to bed.


End file.
